After inventing calculus, actuarial tables and mechanical calculators and creating “the best of all possible worlds”, Gottfried Leibniz still believes his life is incomplete. Since his youth, multi-layered figures of the 17th century dreamed of creating what he called Characteristic globalism– A language that perfectly represents all scientific truths and will make new discoveries as easy as writing grammatically correct sentences. This “letter of human thought” will not leave room for falsehood or ambiguity, and Leibniz will continue to work until the end of his life.
A version of Leibniz’s dream survives today in a programming language. They do not represent the overall body of the physical and philosophical universe, but the next best thing-the increasingly flying parts that make up the internal state of a computer (binary, another Leibniz invention). Computer scientists are brave or crazy enough to build new languages to chase their own language Characteristic globalismThe system can enable developers to behave so that it does not leave dark corners for hiding, so unnecessary comments, documents and unit tests become unnecessary.
But expressiveness is certainly as important as information theory. To me, it’s like listening Countdown ecstasy As a teenager, I consolidated my lifelong affinity for Steely Dan, and my taste for programming languages was the biggest shaped by the first I learned (Objective-c).
It is like saying that Objective-C is similar to a metaphysical divine language, or even a good language, to say that Shakespeare is best appreciated in Pig Latin. Objective-C is polarized at best. It was teased for its relentless detail and peculiar square stands, used only to build Mac and iPhone apps, and would have faded out of the early 1990s if not the unlikely historically quirky quirk. However, during my time working as a software engineer in San Francisco in the early 2010s, I repeatedly found myself in the reviews of Soma’s dive bar or Hackernews defending its most troublesome design choices.
Objective-C comes to me when I need it most. I was a rising college senior and found it too late to have an interest in computer science to its major. As an adult who is enough to drink, I watch teenagers surround me in entry-level software engineering courses. Smartphones are just beginning to spread, but I realize my school doesn’t offer any mobile development courses – I found a niche. That summer, I learned Objective-C from a denim-themed book series. Big nerd ranch. The first time I wrote code on a big screen and saw it light up pixels on a small screen in my hand, I had a hard time winning Objective-C. This makes me feel the intoxicating power of infinite self-expression, and makes me believe that I can create everything I might imagine. I stumbled upon a truly universal language and loved everything about it-until I didn’t.
The twist of fate
Objective-C appears in the early days of the madness of the age of object-oriented programming, and by all points it should never be spared. By the 1980s, software projects had grown into one person or even one team and could not develop alone. To make collaboration easier, Xerox Parc computer scientist Alan Kay created object-oriented programming, a paradigm that organizes code into reusable “objects” that interact by sending “messages” to each other. For example, a programmer may construct a timer object that may receive messages such as start, stop, and read time. These objects can then be reused in different software programs. In the 1980s, the excitement about object-oriented programming was so high that a new language emerged every few months, and computer scientists believed that we were on the cliff of the “software industry revolution.”
In 1983, Tom Love and Brad Cox, software engineers of International Telephone and Telegraph, combined object-oriented programming with the syntax of the popular, readable C programming language to create Objective-C. The two set up a brief company to license language and sell the item library, and before it happens to the abdomen, they landed customers, which would save their creation from obscurity: Next, computer company Steve Jobs was formed after he evicted from Apple. When Jobs returned to Apple with a victory in 1997, he brought Next’s operating system and Objective-C. Over the next 17 years, Cox and Love’s creations will power the products of the world’s most influential technology companies.
Ten and a half years later, I met Objective-C. I see how objects and messages take sentence-like structures with square brackets as dots like [self.timer increaseByNumberOfSeconds:60]. These are not short, Hemingway-like sentences, but long, floral, Proustian sentences, with complex syntax and evoking vivid images, whose functional names are such as scrollviewdidendenddragging: willdecelater.
